"People should be treated with sensitivity during periods of grief and trauma." These words come from the Guardian's editorial code; they are there to guide journalists when reporting events that involve death, loss or serious injury.

It is a very subjective standard. Readers have very strong but very different views of what is and what is not appropriate. After the Madrid bombings that killed 190 people on 11 March 2004, the Guardian carried a front-page photograph which had been manipulated to remove the colour of blood from a severed limb before publication. Many readers complained that this sanitised a murderous act, the full horror of which should have been available for all to see, and that they were mature enough to deal with it.

Two more recent incidents illustrate a different point of view. Ian Redmond, 30, died in a shark attack on 16 August while on his honeymoon in the Seychelles. The Guardian carried a report of an interview with the BBC given by Gemma, his wife, two days after he died. One reader wrote: "Is this really the sort of stuff the Guardian wants to be printing? It could more or less be copy and pasted on to the front of one of those awful 'real life tragedy' magazines … I'm a lifelong reader of the Guardian, but these sorts of stories make me physically cringe, and go running off to the Indy or al-Jazeera. I honestly don't think this sort of macabre, uncomfortable and voyeuristic (not to mention totally irrelevant) material belongs within a hundred miles of a proper paper."

I strongly disagree with the reader on this occasion. It is clear that Mrs Redmond wished to pay public tribute to her husband, praise the men who tried to help him and encourage people to continue to visit the Seychelles. What is harrowing is her description of hearing him scream, but that is a part of her dreadful experience; it only occupies a paragraph and the story carries no detail about her husband's injuries. However, a subheading referred to the scream, which is reasonable as it is a powerful part of the story, but on the other hand it does suggest a more sensational interview than in fact it is.

The second incident concerns the Tour de France, which was the scene earlier in the year of an exceptional run of accidents; one in particular led to the Dutch rider Johnny Hoogerland being pitched from his bicycle into a barbed-wire fence after a car carrying French television journalists collided with a group of cyclists.

"Now, if you or I had our clothes torn off in an accident we'd expect everyone else involved to consider our dignity. In this case, the man was exposed to the world (or maybe only Guardian readers) in what was an invasion of privacy worthy of the lowest Murdoch press."

Once again I disagree. I responded: "I have reviewed this story and the picture used. We do consider the dignity of an individual when picture choices are made. In this case it was important to show the extent of Johnny Hoogerland's injuries, which were not life-threatening … Although I understand your concerns about the photograph that we used, this picture is crucial to the story, clearly demonstrating the results of the crash (which Hoogerland talks about in the article) during this stage of the Tour de France.

"I think it is also important to note that he has not made a complaint about the use of this photograph in the press … "

The reader wasn't satisfied and asked: "Would you have come to the same conclusion, I wonder, if the buttocks concerned had been female?"

That's an interesting issue. The guidelines are too broad to capture that point. If the picture is within a news context and not sexualised, there should be an argument for using it, but it would probably be a tougher decision.